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Monkeys' art of war has lessons for human conflict

Studying animal conflicts could help shed light on human wars – that is the hope from a study of the choices that monkeys make when deciding to fight or remain at peace.

Competition for resources is often assumed to be a main cause of conflict in both humans and other animals, says Jessica Flack at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, but that might be wrong. “We find that fighting is based on memories of what other individuals did last.”

Instead of explaining the monkey’s fighting ways by dreaming up a strategy based, for example, on the reward value of winning a fight for food or a mate, Flack and colleagues decided to look for strategies suggested by the data alone. They made no assumption about the reasons for the monkeys’ behaviour and looked only at patterns of behaviour leading up to fights. This allowed them to determine the relative importance of the factors that led up to a fight.

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They found that the strategy that best explained involvement in a fight was one in which decisions were based on the presence or absence of pairs of other monkeys. This suggests that social dynamics play a central role.

Strategic decisions

Flack says that previous work has shown that monkeys often react to changes in the social structure of their group. A monkey might decide to fight because a rival was gaining dominance, for example, or to defend another monkey that they wanted to make into an ally.

The new finding that previous conflicts shape future decisions suggests that fights may not be directly linked to immediate competition for resources. In the long term, however, the motivations behind the strategy are linked to the fight for status and the access to resources that status brings, says Flack.

Philip Schrodt of Pennsylvania State University in University Park conducts such studies. He says the new approach is intriguing because it could be used to go beyond statistical links and help elucidate the factors that shape conflicts&colon; “This could provide a better understanding of the strategies being used by various actors.”